Safety

Fireman Ray Tannatta had seen one too many smoke-inhalation cases,
especially aggravating when "[t]here's breathable air in the pipes
under every sink in every bathroom." He invented the Llifeline (not a
typo), described and diagrammed in Patent
#4608975. It screws into your sink behind the U-bend, and when
your apartment is on fire you retreat to the bathroom and breathe
plumbing-air until help arrives.

Today the only trace I can find of Llifeline Services, Inc. is a
once-public, now-defunct company called Llifeline Holdings. This is a
pretty good idea, so what happened?

Patent
#490715 provides a clue. It's a hugely complicated improvement
that cites several problems with Tannatta's sink-based design: "the
sink pipe, downstream of the water trap, must be structurally
modified." The original design also "relies on the lungs of the user
to cause a flow of plumbing vent line gas to the user's lungs." Man,
patent writing is even more redundant than magazine writing.

Of course, patent #490715 doesn't exactly make claims to a
category-killer, either. It's a lot more complicated than the
Llifeline, and it seems to only work in high-rise buildings. It also
involves getting air through the toilet, so a lot of people might
choose smoke inhalation rather than survival and embarrassment. So
these are all great ideas that aren't quite workable as products,
though they'd work if you made one yourself in MacGyver desperation.

Nathan Fiegenblatt, who's a Melvin away from having a MAD Magazine
character name, invented this watch that sounds an alarm when the
wearer "opens the wristband."

I wasn't sure what "opens the wristband" meant, so I read the patent,
which really makes it look like the alarm goes off whenever you're not
wearing the watch. I've tried really hard to avoid making jokes about
this, because it can't possibly be what Fiegenblatt had in mind, but I
don't see any other way to interpret Figure 5 or the text of the
patent. You could do a similar watch with a tear-off panic strip
that's separate from the watchband, but Future Stuff raves that
the alarm is triggered when "an attacker knocks [the watch] loose."
Maybe he is a MAD Magazine character after all. Meanwhile, our "Cause
for Alarm" department takes a look at The Lighter Side Of... Digital
Watches!

Fiegenblatt "as yet has no manufacturer to produce" the watch, and
that's the way it stayed. Assuming my ridiculous reading of the patent
is correct, it's not hard to see why. Maybe he did plan ahead for the
user never taking the watch off: it "will operate in a shower, while
sleeping or driving, and while conducting business or playing sports."
Something of an over-broad claim, I think. Do the high shear forces
involved in conducting business render inferior alarm watches
inoperative? Even if you never take the watch off, the idea is flawed,
because the alarm will go off when you open up the wristband to put
the watch on your wrist.

Not sure why this is under "Safety" and not "Danger", because the
bola-snare causes danger and excitement! "This gas-operated device"
fires "four Teflon balls, each at the end of ten feet of flax/nylon
string... on contact, the twine wraps around the target like a
spiderweb." A Batman tie-in could have made this the hot Christmas toy
of 1994, but it was not to be. Like the Wind Weapon, the bola snare
mostly shows up in discussion of games. And Batman. Did I mention
Batman? No? That's possibly because... I'm Batman.

This looks
to be the patent. Inventor R. J. Washington says, "The best thing
about the Bola-Snare is that you protect yourself without seriously
harming your target." He spins a tale of a woman apprehending a
burglar in her kitchen. With Bola-Snare when she finds out that the
burglar was actually her fridge-raiding husband, there is no emergency
room trip, no bitter recrimination. A few bruises, some broken dishes,
they laugh it off!

Ah, the 1980s, a time when cotton shirts "were treated with
formaldehyde to make them wrinkle resistant." Go figure--formaldehyde
isn't that good for you, which is why they usually save it for when
you're already dead. That's why the USDA came up with polycarboxylic
acids as an alternate wrinkle-resister. Polycarboxylic acids don't
sound that great either but then neither does deoxyribonucleic
acid.

Radon: The Silent Killer. Now, there's hope! Ultra-80s RAd Systems has
developed RAdsorb-222, which "absorbs radon-contaminated air into
charcoal filters, where the air is purified and the radon is
trapped. The radioactive gas is then vented to the outdoors, where it
is rendered harmless." What renders it harmless, you ask? Its own
half-life of 3.8 days. Don't stand next to the vent. Eventually
the radon decays into lead. Don't stand next to the vent.

The 222 in RAdsorb-222 stands for 222Rn, the deadly
isotope of radon formed from the breakdown of radium, which in turn
comes (eventually) from naturally occuring uranium deposits. For more
on Radon, see this handy
government pamphlet, "A Citizen's Guide to Radon", also available
in Spanish as "El Radon", the Mexican wrestler.

All radon reduction techniques depend on venting the radon
elsewhere, though if the radon's not too bad you can just seal cracks
in your house. I see charcoal used in radon test kits but not in
today's radon redirectors. RAd systems is defunct, having left behind
only this
technical paper.

How much more vile could this be? The answer is none. None more
vile. Denatonium saccharide will lead the way into a bitter-tasting
future. This is the first Future Stuff entry to give a patent
number (4661504), and
here's
a contemporaneous NYT article on Automergic and the plans for the
vile taste. The actual trademarked name is "Vile", which probably
prevented a GI Joe character from being called Vile.

Denatonium compounds have long been used to denature alchohol; thus
the name, I guess. Denatonium saccharide is now mainly used for that
purpose, but Ropel (DS-based pest repellent) is still sold, though I
couldn't find who makes it. I'm pretty Automergic is out of business
or acquired, and the Ropel trademark ("Ro-Pel") was registered in 1983
by "Burlington Scientific Corporation Corporation"... and "Vile" seems
never to have been registered as a trademark. I'm going to call the
whole thing a front.

America doesn't have telephone
sanitizers like the UK does, so it took Anthony Oliver to come up
with the OliverShield. It's "a paper guard that adheres to the
mouthpiece or earpiece of the phone you're using, to block out
infectious viruses and bacteria."
Not much here, in terms of functionality or still being around. It's a
piece of paper, and nothing like it is on the market now. Not even
courtesy napkins near public phones, like they have in the supermarket
near the bagels.

The difference between pepper spray for bears and pepper spray for
people is the range: bearspray has a range of 30 meters compared to up
to half that for personspray. Future Stuff says that
Bushwhacker Backpack and Supply Company just needs to fill out some
EPA paperwork and then they can claim it's "effective against bears."
Well, they filled out the paperwork and now they're CounterAssault, devoted
entirely to selling pepper spray to civilian, military, and law
enforcement alike. And stuff to protect your gear from bears, those
sold mainly to civilians. And reverse-engineering bears.

Today an 8 ounce canister of bear repellent will run you about
$40/2007, about $10/2007 more than the Future Stuff predicted
price. In many countries where private ownership of pepper spray is
banned, you can still own bear repellent. Just dress your assailant in
a bear costume after dropping them with the 30-foot capsaicin spray,
and you'll be fine.

"An implantable homing device for humans!" This Future Stuff
entry could go several different ways, and as always they choose the
route of goggle-eyed early-1990s-Wired wonderment. Here's the
patent.

Bond-villain-named inventor Daniel Man has the brilliant idea of
using the homing device to locate kidnap victims, and the slightly
less brilliant idea of using it to track Alzheimer's patients and
prisoners on release programs. The signal detected through
triangulation of cellular phone towers, or by three helicopters in the
now-unlikely event that there are no nearby cell towers. Cool features
include recharging "through the skin."

I'm guessing implantable homing devices were nothing new for
animals (thus the Cookie Crisp-like "for humans!"), so I'm not going
to count that as a predictive hit. This never really caught on "for
humans", mainly due to shocking research which determined that homing device implants
might be the mark of the Beast. Prisoner tracking is done with
ankle bracelets.

This document (source) is part of Crummy, the webspace of Leonard Richardson (contact information). It was last modified on Monday, March 31 2008, 00:26:31 Nowhere Standard Time and last built on Thursday, May 24 2018, 19:03:30 Nowhere Standard Time.